


Don't Show, Don't Tell

by abbichicken



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: BDSM, Blood, Bloodplay, Consensual Violence, Cutting, Dreams, Kink Meme, Knifeplay, M/M, Mind Rape, Mindfuck, Power Play, Risk Aware Consensual Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-13
Updated: 2011-07-13
Packaged: 2017-10-21 08:53:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abbichicken/pseuds/abbichicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik is too nice in bed, Charles wishes he would embody his rougher, darker fantasies, whilst somewhere nondescript on the mutant-collecting world tour he goes entirely the wrong way about trying to get him to do so, everything comes out in the wash and there's a happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Show, Don't Tell

Erik comes with a groan and a choking sound that Charles finds more amusing than satisfying, and before a moment more passes, he shifts off and lies around him, heavy and warm and strong across his back for a handful of moments, before rolling away, murmuring words that don't really make sense, but that sound like they're meant to be nice, perhaps grateful, and complimentary. Erik stretches out along the far side of the excessively large and luxurious hotel bed, and is asleep, still sweating from his exertions, hands laced behind his head, in less than a minute.

Charles half-smiles, appreciating the sight of Erik's silhouette in the accustomed luminescent gloom of night-cityscape-with-the-curtains-open, other half thoroughly disappointed, and jacked up with unrequited need.

They've slipped so easily into sex, since it was first apparent that their appreciation of each other's appearance was mutual. The first time was delightful, for want of a better word. Erik turned out to be infinitely more generous than Charles had imagined him to be, strong and embracing and predictable and warm and very...appropriate. It wasn't what Charles had expected, if he was to be honest, he'd thought it would be something so much rougher around the edges.

Since the night when he'd wrapped himself sea-deep around an Erik so full of rage and hate and _power_ that he was on the way to suicide, since he'd felt the man so fucking incredibly alive that he would rather die than drop focus, Charles had held the vision of being absolutely ruined by him in bed.

And despite all his hopes and attempts at subtle hinting and pathetic attempts to verbally reweight their fucking, this just refuses to happen.

Charles grits his teeth wondering if he's being ungrateful, if he shouldn't keep quiet, but so much of him aches to play with the Erik that doesn't seem to want to show up between the sheets. He knows, is absolutely positive that Erik is the person he's been waiting for, to fulfil fantasies he's had for years, and never had a partner that could come close to them. Erik has that spark of danger, and the strength and the physique, fuck, but he looks so very, very right for this with his clothes off, a slab of marble that people have tried to carve their way into, one way or another, but all the marks on Erik's body seem resolutely his own, as much a part of his physique as the muscles he crafts from a meticulous circuit of exercises performed at an hour of the morning that Charles would describe as "just about time for bed at the end of a good night out".

He's asked about the scars, some obviously from burns, from accidents, others clearly more surgical, done with precision and certainty, but Erik won't tell. Charles is frustrated by this too, for, having seen the overview in the superscape of his travels around the inside of Erik's mind, he would like to know more of the details. He likes to save some things for the long, long conversations they seem to have fallen into the habit of, but, so far, Erik won't give when Charles pushes up against these observations he's made about which he's so intrigued. Erik has a wall up around his wounds, and, as much as he won't apologise for them, he won't talk about them, either.

It's this reticence which stops Charles from investigating them quite the way he'd like to. He wants to trace them, draw attention over them, test the density of scar tissue, but there's no room for that when things are so soft and delicious and precise.

In his mind, there's some line that can be crossed at this point, and maybe it would jumpstart the rage he so desires.

Perhaps he should bring this...fantasy up, some time, in a more academic way, perhaps start a fascinating conversation on the human fascination with violence, or his aesthetic interest in the Spartans, something like that...maybe just drop in a few hints about liking to live on the edge sometimes...

...no, no, that's not going to work. Charles doesn't generally have any problem, as a rule, with discussing sex, sexuality, what he wants, what he doesn't, but Erik is so...evasive. It verges on shy, but isn't that, because he has the least self-conscious approach to sex and to his own body that Charles has ever encountered. It's very...complete, though. Once they're started, Charles doesn't feel there's room for varying the script. And that's okay...

...except, maybe, he could just…suggest...after all, it's not so outlandish to suggest that Erik might want to use all that strength and power he has in the safety of this amount of luxury (he's always fucking commenting on Charles' preference for a decent hotel, it brings out a prickly enough side of him, this would just be an extension of that, wouldn't it?)...he seems to be more than aroused by acts of violence and cruelty than Charles is himself, but if that's the case, why is it so fucking hard to even hint at the idea that he might be slightly less than lovely, hey?

Charles lies there a while longer and toys with this way and that way of saying one thing and another.

One of his greatest flaws, he decides, after three rounds of self-indulgent introspection, is that conversation seems so clunky and exhausting. It has its merits, its high points, there are times when great conversation is like a fine game of chess, of course, but when it comes to comprehension, to emotion, to conveying something decisive to someone who perhaps isn't as receptive as they might be, it's exhausting, a spindle of wound awkwardness and playing by the point. When you know the short cuts so well, the scenic route can look like a vast waste of time.

Charles first discovered he could screw with people's dreams when Raven told him about her fascinating, but, after a while, exhausting nightmares. After one too many nights of her crawling in beside him, shaking with fear because of her subsconscious' fixation with vicious kingsize spiders, or evil people insulting her face (or, worst of all: vicious kingsize evil spiders insulting her face), he began to push into her sleeping mind, rearranging things here and there, and asking her at some length what she'd experienced the next morning. He kept his promise not to read her mind, not to uncover her thoughts and desires and so on, but just... gently removing associations here and there, suggesting scenarios based on things they'd done that day, holidays they'd talked about taking, nothing much, turned out to be all the cure she needed. Charles ensured her dreams were so dull, that when, once he'd laid off her sleeping mind, she encountered the spiders and insults, they were something of an amusement.

He never found dream-wrangling particularly useful, though, amusing, occasionally, on the train, where you could find out some very interesting things about the person napping opposite you, sure, entertaining, if you wanted to suggest your talents were perhaps more than experience had shown, but still, it was hardly the peak of his powers.

To be perfectly fair, he does tussle with the idea of what he's about to do for a moment or five. He constructs his thoughts carefully, trying to edit them like a good film, picking the best angles, showing the excitement and the heat and the sheer fucking elation that flickers across his body at so much as the suggestion of these acts, rather than the soft porn, cheap tricks aspect of it all. The more carefully he builds the illusion, the less 'soft' there is about it.

He is carried away with himself, and the alcohol, and the endorphins still lacing his bloodstream from the sex that was a preamble, rather than a conclusion, to his sketches.

"Let me show you something," he whispers, out loud, to Erik's perfectly quiet form.

He puts his fingers to his temple, and focuses on Erik, whose mind, it transpires, is, at this point, completely blank.

He projects a few things he's thought of, these last few weeks, when he's felt so close to Erik he's been certain that everything he wants could come true, with the right...with just a bit of a...if only they would...if only he could make himself clear...

The first time Charles was aware of his taste for something wild, for the out-of-control was as a young undergraduate, out in a shit pub on the outskirts of Oxford. It was a miserable, wet night, and the place was full of people who looked as if they'd come in to keep dry and drink away the misery of it all, as much as anything else. It was crowded, dripping with condensation and thick with smoke.

Scuffles broke out here and there, as the evening wore on, and somewhere through it all, it turned into a lock-in, and men were squaring up to each other as if their lives depended on it, which was possible given the fistfuls of coins changing hands. One fight after another, over drinks, money, over the passing of time, and Charles wondered if this was a regular event; no-one seemed surprised, and the bar was doing a roaring trade, so it wasn't as if they were going to start throwing people out. The fights looked fair for the most part, generally well-matched, almost always the cross between town and gown.

As one fight ended, a quiet descended, and the crowds parted to allow a young, lean, pale man into the small ring of floor left clear. He undoes a stained work shirt to reveal a patchwork of scars, bruises and veins. His muscles are so clearly defined, he's like a medical chart.

He squares his shoulders, and his back ripples with construction and possibility. A huge bloke steps forward, offering to take him on. Conversation ruffles, money exchanges hands, and the lean bloke is on his toes, bouncing.

The larger man belts him so hard Charles flinches from the sound alone. The fight doesn't look fair, but like all the best brawls, skill and speed prevails. It's bloody and vicious and Charles has never seen anything like it in his life.

By the end, the lean man is bleeding in three places, teeth stained red, it dripping from the knuckles of his left hand, his muscles taut and sweat mixing, dripping with condensation. The whole place tastes of metal and something primal, and Charles can barely contain himself. All he wants is to be...part of that. To fuck that; be fucked by that, around that, to experience the physicality, the spread of humanity that he can taste in the air; that much anger, electricity, how does it feel to have that crackling across your body and through your veins? What does that look like up close? How does it feel, not knowing how hard the impact will be, where it will fall, how your body will react? As the fight comes to a climax, the larger man flat on his back, the catch of Charles' eye stood with a foot clamped down on his chest, fists clenched and arms flexed into a diagram of sinew, Charles can only sit back and stare, and try and etch every detail of the sight into the back of his mind, for keeps..

Charles is left sitting in the corner, when the doors are unlocked and the crowd, bloodlust and thirst sated for now, trickles out. He drains the flat end of his sixth pint, the pub's jaundiced, bug-eyed landlord already flinging handfuls of sawdust over bloodspatters, spit and beer. He looks up at Charles. "Fuck off home, 's well past closing." Embarrassed, and stumbling as he gets up, Charles can't get home quick enough. Part of him wants to find that bloke, who must be bruising, clotting, reveling in his wins, or perhaps he doesn't even care, perhaps this is all he does every weekend, maybe this is how his life is. Part of him knows he can never come here again, never see him again, wants to keep the vision of the whole experience intact and vivid and unspoilt.

He spends longer than he'd care to admit reliving that time, idly wondering where he might find it again, if not in life, at least in literature, in art, in science. The references are many, he realises, once he starts to look. Time passes, and nothing compares to the taste of blood and filth in the air. It feels as separate as his appreciation of men does from the endless stream of easy-come, easy-go relationships around him, a spare sexuality in itself that doesn't bear relevance to the one night stands he brings home, and, as the years go by, it becomes a secret Charles considers more defining, more essentially private than even the details of his powers.

The images he collects, scenarios he runs over, the ache inside him for a chance to fulfil them, to test himself in the face of as much pain and fear and excitement as he can dream of, they're thoughts that are shaping and changing all the time, never so far from his mind that he can't conjure them up any time he needs the quickest and most emphatic relief. He looks too long at people he wouldn't usually consider, rough crowd, a certain type of soldier on leave, kids peering out of the shadows, smoking on street corners. Anyone who exudes violent unpredictability. He hasn't the guts or confidence or true desire to chase it, is terrified, at heart, of what the actuality of his thoughts might be, worst of all, of it not being the perfect sexual experience he's elevated it to in his mind, of it being the point at which he is caught out, found out, made less and humiliated for wanting something he can't handle.

Which is why he couldn't leave it, with Erik, because Erik is everything he never imagined possible in a human - mutant - partner. Everything. Because Erik is _magnetic_ and because he can't - doesn't want to, shouldn't have to? - hide this from someone he wants to give everything he is and has to. He's so used to settling, to making do, but with Erik, he knows there could be something so, so much more. He trusts Erik enough to be able to understand his urges, is certain Erik experiences them himself. That he doesn't trust Erik any further than the beginning of his fantasy, though...that, that is the single greatest reason he can't not try.

 _Whatever he could do to me...whatever happens...I want it so much, it doesn't matter._

It's rare that Charles' own thoughts thrill him this much.

Which is why he's doing this, now, has done this, has made Erik's sleeping body twitch and groan and kick and there, clenched fists, set jaw, flickering expressions. Charles wants to dive into this right now, to wake him up and try it immediately, but he also needs to sleep, and wait, and needs this to be okay; the shortcut to explanation is one thing, but he needs concrete, _we're going to do this_ , and that needs daylight and then a lot more alcohol.

It's morning outside, Charles registers, his body finally so tired of sustaining awakeness that he can't keep himself going any longer. Erik has finally stopped stirring, and is still. Usually he'd be up, exercising, eating (Erik eats _everything_ ), walking ( _not now Charles, I'm thinking_ , he says, if Charles tries to reach him whilst he's walking, but Charles can already see that, this early in the day, Erik's head is completely empty), doing things that he keeps to himself.

Charles doesn't begrudge him this, indeed, like all the other things he can't access in Erik, he finds that this is beautiful, and attractive.

And it all winds together when you factor in the way that he loves the tension of irritating Erik, that pang in his guts between embarrassment and naughtiness which is so rooted in what it is to be so wanting that it can't help but be the most confusing and shameful turn-on; potential anger raises Erik's hackles, and Charles feels he can taste the spike of testosterone that swathes Erik at the slightest misplacement of attentions at such times.

Erik shifts and sweats in his sleep, turning this way, that. Charles doesn't see, because, as soon as he's decided his work here is done, it's as if he can shut his brain down perfectly; sleeping deeply, dreamlessly, instantly. Erik is still next to him when Charles wakes up, well past breakfast and into the morning. He's awake, but just...lying there. Instant eye contact that takes Charles a moment to focus into.

Neither of them move; they're just...lying there, staring, Charles catches himself trying to see...something in Erik's eyes, some kind of answer, a recognition, but there doesn't seem to be anything obvious. Nothing so much as a smile.

He's halfway to putting his fingers to his temples, a look in his eyes that says, this is okay, isn't it, it's fine if you don't want to talk about it, we can shortcut this, but Erik slaps his wrist down, defensively.

"Don't. Please."

Charles frowns, a ball of caution.

"Are you...?"

Erik slides across and wraps himself close and tight around him.

"Yeah, he says, quietly. "Yeah. I'm fine."

Charles is not reassured by the rate at which Erik's heart is pounding.

They don't speak much for the rest of the morning. They have an appointment to keep, a plan made, but that's for later. And then, later still, another journey, another hotel, another night, just the two of them.

Everything goes just to plan, but everything seems to be happening just a little to the left of where it ought to be.

Charles had hoped for today to be…different, to be open, to be able to talk it out, in those empty hours of waiting, to get the wrangling out of the way, then…later…telepathy at its best, a daft hope, he decides..., acknowledging to himself the thoughts he’d had about whetting of appetites, sharing things you shouldn't share on a train journey, talking filth and telling truths and sharing more of his thoughts and wants about something so _close_ , he’d imagined the entire situation in a way that was much more accommodating, and as the day wears on, he begins to wonder why the hell he expected today to be anything like that at all.

None of the ways he’d imagined the day were anything like this...a horribly graceful silence, wrought with a sadness that he can't place or understand. There’s none of the casual touching, none of the amusement to the small things that happen, no discussion of…anything.

Of course it's the memories of last night, of the dreams he's planted there, he assumes that Erik has had some reaction, somewhere, but he's being so excessively quiet and kind today, Charles can't comprehend what that reaction has actually been.

Eventually, after an age of quiet, an hour of travel that neither of them will ever get back, during which Charles imagines fifteen ways Erik might hate him, or judge him, or, actually, be appalled by him, they get off the train at yet another small capital city. This was supposed to be a break, a stopover, a chance to…have some fun. Exiting the station, Erik stops, steps back, waiting for the crowds to pass.  
The area is quiet, a weekday afternoon, clear skies; a nothing day for everyone else.

Erik sits on a wall, meticulously lights a cigarette, and inhales, slowly, slowly, exhaling slower still.

Charles sits by him, saying nothing.

Finally, flicking the end of the cigarette at the wall, and watching the arc of sparks subside, Erik sighs. "I can’t say it,” he says, pushing his hair back in wringing self-disappointment. “I know you can just look in here," Erik taps his forehead, looking ashamed, "and save me the embarrassment of trying to explain this to you. Get on with it."

"If you'd rather..?" Charles says, trying innocence out as an expression.

Erik nods, and stares at the ground. He's pale, and looks tired.

Charles looks, tentative, genuinely afraid to see what might be going on here, and see he does, and as he does, he has such a terrible crunch of sinking understanding. His insides mush into leaden anxiety, as he sees everything he projected last night, and, around it all, the vast complexity of terrible, vicious feelings and associations Erik’s mind has tangled around the scenes.

“I don’t even…oh, _fuck_ , I can’t explain why it won’t leave me, I don’t…I don’t dream, not usually, not like this. It was so fucking real, Charles,” his voice is so low, and quiet, and directed at the cobblestones, so it’s difficult to hear, but Charles doesn’t need to hear the words to get the point, which is sharp, and astonishingly painful, “I feel…so much, I feel things I never feel, for fuck’s sake, Charles, the intensity of those things, I felt everything I did, and I was…I’m so sorry…”

It is so glaringly obvious that Erik believes these are the creations of his own mind, that there’s something rotten and destructive going on, that he’s not capable of what he thought they had – fuck, that’s the worst of it, that Erik feels as if this is an end, a sign of his own weakness and failure, and it is so very, very far from any interpretation Charles could have placed upon it.

Charles assumes too often that everyone else is a blank canvas, and he kicks himself inside, hacks at the weight in his guts that tells him he should never fucking assume anything of anyone else, especially when you’ve seen the state of their insides, but he thought...he thought...he scrabbles for ways to fix this, to explain it, to try and find a path back around so that they really are where he started out from…even at this point, Charles is still incapable of getting out of his own way.

"I should tell you something," Charles says, and he feels so conspicuous and stupid that what he really wants to do is wipe Erik's mind clean of all of this and settle for whatever it is that they had - have...what they have, have, nothing's over yet.

And he explains that it wasn’t meant to be like that, that it wasn’t meant to look that way, that it definitely wasn’t meant to relate to all those things that Erik has done, that he’s had done to him, that he just wanted to show Erik that he wasn’t made of glass and that he could take -

"Stop!" Erik starts, his eyes wide and...hurt, actually. He shakes his head and looks into Charles' eyes so hard that Charles fears the glare of the whites of his eyes will be burned onto his own, and then he walks away.

"I'm going to find the hotel," he says, without looking over his shoulder.

Charles nods, silently.

He passes the next two hours in the nearest pub. Charles has always found a pint to be the best way to take away an excess of time, and even now, it’s as effective as ever.

That Erik is actually at the hotel when Charles turns up, that he answers the door when Charles knocks, that he lets him in the room, all of these things surprise Charles.

“Sit,” Erik says, pointing to the straight-backed desk chair in the corner. Charles does as he’s told. Erik, sitting on the edge of the bed, cracking open the last of the miniature Scotches that accompanied the room, takes a sip and clears his throat.

“I don’t think you’re that stupid, Charles. Are you? Are you really that cruel, that you’d show me those things and think so little of me, that I’d just jump up and say hey, come on, why don’t I treat you like someone I despise? Why don’t we play the game where I behave like you’re responsible for everything that’s been done to me, everything that’s left me as I am?”

“It’s not,” Charles starts, “it wasn’t about that...I didn’t think…”

“No, no you did think. I do know a few things about you, and one of them is that you think too fucking much, Charles, far too fucking much.”

“I know, that’s part of –“

“When I want your side of things, I’ll ask for it.”

Charles is appalled at himself for the tweaks of delight he experiences as Erik speaks to him that way.  
Appalled. But he lets himself notice the fire in it anyway.

"I've been around men who thought they wanted to play with pain before. The reality...let's say, it wasn't what they hoped for. It’s not a game. It’s not something I want from you, you don’t need to prove anything to me…"

"It's not like that, I'm not...it's not proving something, it's..."

"I don't understand," Erik says. "Why would you want me to hurt you? I've been there, Charles, it's not fun."

"We don't have to talk about this; I understand it's not your thing, and I'm sorry for -" Charles replies, trying hard to make the whole fucking lot of this go away, but Erik's having none of it.

"No, no, I rather think we do have to talk about this. After what you showed me, I think you desperately fucking need to talk about this."

"Well...what do you want me to say?"

"The things I've done to people, the things I've done to get what I want, to take revenge, I've hurt people in ways I hope you can't imagine, in ways I hope you can't find in my mess of a brain, because they're so fucking messy, even I surprise myself with the way some of them have ended. I won't deny my understanding of the pleasure-pain principles, nor that I am familiar with the sadistic joy of seeing the right people in pain, because oh, those people, I want them to hurt so very much, Charles, I want them to know thousandfold the extent to which the human body is capable of feeling pain. The people I've tortured, though, the people I've killed, because, don’t forget, that’s where this ends, for me, only too often, those people, they deserved it, I truly believed that, each and every one of them deserved everything I could inflict and more."

Charles just nods.

There's a gulf, he thinks, between what he wants, and the way it sounds when he says it. And that gulf is nothing compared to the chasm between what he’s talking about, and what Erik’s referring to.

"It's not like...I'm not..." Charles breaks out in a nervous laugh,inappropriate or otherwise, in the middle of his sentence, "I'm not normal. If I want you to stop, Erik, I can stop you."

Erik raises an eyebrow.

"Can you?"

"Of course! I don't mean to belittle you, I really don't, but I can make you do anything I want you to. Or stop you from doing things, if I think you've gone too far. Or if I change my mind..."

"And how about if you're unconscious, Charles? Can you stop me then?"

"Well...no..."

Erik sees excitement pulse in Charles' throat, watches him catch himself in a spasm of desire.  
He holds up a hand, silencing Charles, when he goes to try and make words work this through again. “I need you to stop.”

It isn't his business to judge, he thinks. And...enough time has passed, from shock to digestion. What upset him, he realises, playing back through the emotional gauntlet he’s run, was the idea that he himself would seek to fuck up something so good with aspects of his past that, as far as he's been concerned, have no place in this relationship. In any relationship.

This is not what has happened.

So...if it isn't his fault...if these things are all Charles, if that's what he wants, if this isn't about the past, and it isn't about hate and it isn't about revenge, if it's about making Charles happy, with something that, unarguably, comes naturally to him, then...

...and after all, it is the thing that attracts him most to Charles, is that he never needs to moderate his own needs and beliefs and thoughts; in such a short space of time he has told and shown Charles so many things, things he's carried guilt and shame in their various incarnations for for years, and Charles has never once backed off. Even when he's been appalled, when he's disagreed, when he's been shocked, Charles has always spoken up, but never taken so much as half a step back.

Erik has never tried to deny the violence in himself, and he knows well that he could continue, could gladly continue, with things being the way they’ve been. He’s never known such calm, and such satisfaction as with Charles, and he wants for absolutely nothing. But, if Charles doesn’t feel the same, then, that’s not a situation with which Erik would like to live.

After all, in these dreams, now Erik feels more at liberty to examine them (and it’s not like they’re not right there at the forefront of his mind in glorious technicolour) Charles looks like...like...like Erik’s never seen him. Like, he’s willing to bet, Charles has never seen himself. Just an absolute fucking wreck, but bleeding – literally – excitement and thrill and sheer want.

Erik stretches back on the bed, cigarette in hand, flicking its ash onto the floor as he scrutinises the sequence of events from angles other than his own.

He holds smoke deep in his lungs in preservation as he lets himself smile, seeing his own, highly accurately-drawn coldness and its effects.

And the lengths Charles’ mind has gone to…there’ll be no need to take it quite that far, Erik thinks, and it isn’t as if he can’t see…can’t feel the...he slides his hand down the front of his trousers, thoughtfully, testing his own arousal, and sensing, slowly, slowly, that maybe there is a compromise, here, that, perhaps, he doesn’t have to be this wound up, and it is, after all, part of who he is, and maybe, maybe this is the best way to bring Charles up to scratch with a few things...

...he can feel Charles, watching him, seemingly unable or unwilling to prevent his interest from projecting itself...

...Erik realises that he is on the verge of writhing with his own arousal, and the whisky is more than hitting the spot, and he can feel the familiar rise of self-confidence and arrogance in his throat, the strength, the tang of his own power piqued and primed and ready...

He flips himself up, off the bed, and walks up to Charles, right up to him, looking down on him, a smile twisting itself through his features.

“Are you sure?”

Charles nods, dumb, lost in the transition from seriously-why-would-you-want-this to hi-I-am-what-you’ve-been-waiting-for.

Erik extinguishes his cigarette on the side of Charles’ neck, pushing the butt tight into his skin as Charles jolts and his eyes bulge in surprise.

Erik laughs.

He waits, and stops, and listens, ears and mind alike, for a reaction from Charles. There is nothing.  
He hauls Charles to his feet, takes a few steps back, and forages in the minibar for another drink.

“Strip!” he orders, without even looking at Charles.

Succeeding in finding vodka, he cracks the top of it, drinks the double shot in one go, tosses the bottle over his shoulder and strides back across to hasten Charles’ disrobing, which is taking far too long, perhaps because Charles is all thumbs, such is his obvious excitement. Erik has him naked in a few moments with the application of brute force easily winning out against great tailoring.

“Look at you,” Erik says, growls, slinks, running his hand down Charles’ face, over the burn, along the line of his collarbone and down his chest. “Blank fucking canvas.”

Charles doesn't see the back of Erik's hand coming, is caught by surprise beneath the jaw, cracking his teeth together and falling backwards all at once, stumbling. Erik catches his body at the hip and shoulder, grabbing him so tight Charles can virtually feel fingerprints etching themselves possessively across him.

Drawing and hesitating for the off-beat, Erik hits him in the face again, black-eye inducing, as Charles sees stars in five dimensions as his body's thrown up on the bed and his head hits the headboard.

"Look at me," Erik snaps, gripping Charles' face and forcing them eye-to-eye, "at least have the fucking decency to look at me whilst I'm giving you what you want."

Charles’ eyes are clear and definite and open and _smiling_ and Erik finds himself surprised at how much this feels like a game, at how…himself he feels right now, at how shockingly satisfying it is to sink teeth into someone’s shoulder and bite until it punctures, and Charles is surprised by how fucking strange and alien and damn dramatic it is to feel that, and everything slips into a strange haze of the taste of blood – his own, kissed back immediately, Erik’s own interpretation of conveying the fact that this is really everything he can offer all at once.

A series of moments, strong, sudden pains, tests, a winding up, Erik finds a way to catch him everywhere, and doesn’t miss the fact that Charles’ cock is solid, wanting, that Charles can’t help but try and find purchase against him at every moment.

Then he’s gone, and Charles opens his eyes again – keeps missing things, keeps disappearing into the dark because it seems to make the sensations so much stronger, but at the same time, he’s missing half of everything he wanted to see, which is Erik, bloodied, cold eyes, cruel eyes, fixating on him and nothing else.

If this were any of the other times they’d fucked, they would by lying close, all hands, stroking, soft, coaxing, expert but regular, stimulating by default.

This is nothing like that.

Erik is undressing himself, shirt, shoes, socks, belt...he stops at the belt, running it across his palm, a long, black, leather strip. His smile is too wide for his mouth, and Charles feels the spike of fear, _what happens now_ , what happens now is that Erik raises the belt high in the air and cracks it, once, twice, laughing with the broadest and most terrifying smile on his face as Charles flinches in anticipation of what doesn't quite come. He lashes it across Charles' thighs on the half-beat of his expectation and Charles contorts in surprise at the strength of it, then relaxes, embracing the burning stripe of pain and the wave of heat it generates across his body.

Erik strikes him again, harder, and Charles sees a pang of hesitation cross Erik's expression as the leather cuts shallow into his flesh, feels the dent in the atmosphere, and he arches up and groans, loudly, keep the momentum going, "Fuck yes..."

Biting back any sense of half-measure, Erik brings down the belt a third and final time, so hard it rips itself from his hand and spatters the drawn blood across Charles' leg. Climbing on the bed with no care for clumsiness, he manhandles Charles over, face down. "I don't want to look at your fucking face, you look pathetic..."

And he does, Erik thinks, wonderfully, comically pathetic. This gives him as much a kick as anything. Charles deserves this.

He wrenches springs from the mattress with will alone, and binds Charles’ wrists, too tight for comfort, all but too tight for bloodflow, right where they are. _Right where I want you_.

His nails rake across Charles' back, mimicking the cross-run of bloody scratches Charles transplanted into  
Erik's dreams the night before. Charles is shaking, squirming against the mattress, against Erik's body, grating for all the feeling he can find. He feels Erik’s tongue wet and heated over the cuts, sucking viciously, teeth at the edges of the wound and feels himself gripped so tight, so tight, Erik’s fingers digging deep at his ribcage, so deep they might as well be inside him, he’s never felt so at the edge of things, as if he’s watching himself, he can’t find his own focus or take stock of one moment before it turns into another, so it’s as if he’s…powerless.

He feels utterly powerless.

It is liberating, rather than terrifying.

Erik is gone again from his back, and pacing, and Charles lies there, biting the bedclothes, smarting in fifteen places, waiting.

The belt licks his back.

“Pretty,” Erik murmurs, to himself.

Again, and again, hard enough to mark, enough to highlight the scratches and gouges in his flesh, Charles feels the belt move this way, this way, that way, that way, a pattern of searing warmth that is both reassuring and excruciating, as his arms numb.

Charles has never felt pain like this. He’s never suffered anything so much as a childhood scrap, definitely never let himself get into a proper fight. He’s barely even fallen over badly, not without so much alcohol in his system that it didn’t matter. Without a framework for comparison, without this being anything other than the exact realisation of a scenario he’s imagined time and over, even what hurts, doesn’t. It makes him salivate, and squirm, and sweat, and his breath is rasping and hot and as he turns and looks back, up, at Erik, whose chest is streaked with Charles’ blood, whose body is lean and cut and flushed with intent, Erik, who’s paused to pace around the bed, eyeing him this way, that way, a curl to his lips and a fire in his eyes that sets Charles’ heart pounding.

“Oh, fuck…” Charles says, finding going this long without being touched difficult, missing the onslaught of feelings already.

“What?” Erik asks, kneeling down, looking him in the eye.

He reaches across and, too slowly, digs his nails into Charles’ back, claws slowly, slowly, snagging, slipping at skin, Charles’ focus falling in and out of shot now.

“Fuck,” he repeats, heaving the syllable out.

“I can’t hear,” Erik says.

Charles clears his throat, dry and raw with keeping in his would-be shouts.

“Fuck me.”

Erik spits in his face and walks away.

He watches as Charles’ hips jolt and press at the bed, and is amused to see what it is that pushes Charles over.

“As you wish,” he says, after a moment more.

Without a second for preparation or lubrication, Erik pulls Charles' legs further apart than they want to comfortably go, and pushes himself inside in two hard, assured thrusts. He's so much harder, Charles feels, his body stretched long and flat and the thin metal coils digging deep into his wrists. Erik feels twice the size he usually does, or else he himself is so much less accommodating, something about this is so much _more_ , so open and different, so very, very different...everything tastes different, better than he had imagined it could. Erik is like another person entirely, when he isn't presenting and curving himself in all of the right ways, when he's not making sure not to stress the situation, to make it perfectly comfortable, when he thrusts with his entire body, tearing purchase against his shoulders and his chest sticking in a paste of sweat and blood against sore wounds, he's so solid and firm and sharp against and inside Charles, who feels now as if parts of his body have become detached from themselves, everything hurts separately and together, an orchestral cacophony of glorious sensation. It's like being fucked through the end of the world.

With the taste of strain and fear and blood all around him, it doesn’t take Erik long at all, and he treats Charles with just the lack of care that he dreamt, pushing and moulding Charles’ body beneath him to take every stroke just as he wants it, leaving handprints and bloodstains left, right and fucking centre. He comes hard and hot into Charles, the slick an immediate relief, and then an emptiness and loss so dramatic that Charles is fucking whining into nothing.

Erik's hand reaches beneath them both, twists him through twined legs onto his side, finds Charles' cock slick and coated and still half-hard - squeezes him too hard, his other hand raking, pulling, slipping around Charles' body and pinching hard at one of his nipples; Charles is crying with involuntary reaction as he comes for the final time, before sinking, definitively, into the sodden bedclothes, fighting for the least of breath to process and deliver as a quiet, satisfied, low-manic laughter.

Rather than rolling over and going to sleep, Erik still rests for a second, lets his heart rate moderate, lets his body compose itself. He looks at the mess of Charles’ back, sides, thighs. Most of the blood is peripheral, but Charles hasn’t had enough practice with these aspects of human body to know the difference. To him, this will look like the nightmare he wanted. Only the deepest of the lashes and the burn will last more than a couple of days; everything else will fade. He snaps the springs, has them recoil themselves, and Charles slides his arms out, starshaped, sighing and spent.

Erik disappears into the bathroom, washes his hands and face, and looks closely at himself in the mirror.

Nothing seems to have changed. He checks, inside and out, scanning his expression for signs of guilt, of something wrong, for those shadows that he sees in the whites of his eyes when he's done deeds he knows the world would have him be ashamed of.

There's nothing like that here.

Erik smiles his most content smile to himself, and laughs, as if he's trying it out as a response to the events of the night.

Strangely, it seems to fit.

He runs the bath full of cold, cold water.

Back in the room, Charles is dazed, shivering, bleeding. He’s past joy, past spent, into some strange combination of satisfaction and accomplishment.

"Hey," Erik says, tentative.

"Mmm," Charles replies, tasting blood in his mouth.

He squints and focuses on Erik, just standing there.

"How do you look so..." no, no speaking. Words aren't presenting themselves, and, actually, why should they bother to do so, Charles reckons, in half-thought, why can't he just...pass out quietly now, hey?

"Are you okay?" Erik asks, "I mean...are you..."

Distantly, in the back of his mind, like a radio in someone's car outside, Erik hears _I can't believe what just happened. I can't fucking move, but that's fine. That's fine. It's all fine. Fuck._

There are more sounds, but they aren't really words.

Erik picks Charles up easily, and takes him into the bathroom, where he drops him, gently, into the freezing cold water.

"FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKWHATTHEFUCK"

"Shhh, Erik says, "deep breaths."

Charles endeavours to obey, fighting his urge to curl into a ball and burst into tears, as Erik empties the ice bucket over him.

"If you want," he says, "to play these games, you have to clean up afterwards."

"But, also," Charles says, sinking as far as he can into the water, eyes closed, "I could go to sleep instead?"

"In a minute. Just look at this as another kind of pain."

Charles makes some more sounds, which might be along the lines of “’s good, very good pain, extremely tired now, many thanks and goodnight.”

Erik ignores the words, checks Charles isn’t going into some kind of shock (not a good ending to any procedure, and certainly a lot more care than anyone ever gave him) cleans his cuts, is expressionlessly impressed by the sheer amount of mess he's made of Charles' body, and, also, by the way he finds he feels, that this happened, and that this, whilst incredibly, inexorably fucking weird, has turned out...okay. Better than that, even.

He goes so far as to steal a change of sheets from the cleaners’ closet down the hall, along with a few spare bottles of minibar refill, and sets about making it look less like a massacre, more like the luxury he’s come to enjoy, the last few nights.

Erik resists a very strong urge to combine vodka and open wounds in the name of cleanliness, fearing he might end up doing damage that lasts, and knowing that that, he would be doing for himself. But, he lets himself imagine it, reliving the taste of blood at his lips, letting flashes of the fear and excitement in Charles’ eyes become memories, things worth holding onto, rather than occasions to forget.

By this point in time, everything is new for Erik, everything is different. He realises that, just as important as a physical victory over his past, is the conquering of his own mind. Wonderful as it is that Charles can do things Erik can’t even understand in his mind, useful as it’s been, and will no doubt continue to be, he doesn’t want to surrender himself. Being able to apply the skills and lessons learned from his past, things with such terrible context into something so…powerful, so fascinating…it isn’t only Charles who’s evolved tonight.

As he lies there, Charles trying to get comfortable around him, Erik hears, clear as anything, Charles in his head.

 _Thank you_.

Erik nods.

"I hope it matched up to your dreams."

 _Better_.

Erik smiles.

He hopes it'll still be like this in the morning, this comfortable and calm, that when Charles tries to do just about anything, and feels what real damage is like on the second day, and the third, he won’t develop that terrible awkwardness of, this is something we should never have done. Or worse.

If it had gone that way, then Erik wouldn’t have hesitated to remind Charles that this was all his fault. A part of him still has room to be angry with Charles for what he did, the way he chose to invade his mind, but unless provoked, he’s happy enough with the way things have gone that he can use and settle that anger with more of this, if that’s really what Charles wants.  


And the next morning, it’s absolutely fine.

Charles is admirably good at being wounded, indeed, he seems to enjoy it, luxuriating in creative stretches, the soreness and the twinges. His body seems to heal well, and he is quieter than usual, smiles broader than usual, and when Erik kisses him the next morning, and, experimentally, yanks his head back hard, twisting a handful of hair around long fingers, Charles is all laughing and _yes_ , alongside the feeling of every welt and scrape in his flesh waking up with him, and there is, they’re both thinking, a way of bringing all of the best and worst of each of them into something communal that can force everything about what it is for them to be together, to make sense.


End file.
